Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods

Andrew O'Malley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319947365
• eBook ISBN: 9783319947372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period's newly established children's book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

© The Author(s) 2018

Andrew O'Malley (ed.)Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century ChildhoodsLiterary Cultures and Childhoodshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Childhoods and Literary Cultures

Andrew O’Malley¹

(1)

Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Andrew O’Malley

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The eighteenth century has long been regarded as a watershed period in the history of both childhood and children’s literature. It saw the rapid growth of a specialized text industry addressing young readers,¹ and at the same time, the child became increasingly visible and important in a range of ‘adult’ discourses. Philippe Ariès’s now more than a half-century-old assertion that the child, as differentiated subject with its own needs and material culture, did not exist in Europe before the seventeenth century has rightly and usefully been critiqued,² as has J. H. Plumb’s famous celebration of a ‘new world of children’ in the eighteenth century.³ Yet the fact remains that, certainly and most notably within the more privileged segments of English society, experiences of childhood for many changed significantly in the period this volume considers, as did the ways in—and extent to—which the child circulated within literary culture.

There has been considerable scholarship, including new research to appear in the other volumes of the Literary Cultures and Childhoods series, demonstrating that the generations before the period considered here produced or adapted texts for the use of child readers. Likewise, ‘the child’ had already accrued a variety of cultural meanings in the literary imagination. One significant change in the long eighteenth century, however, is the ubiquity of childhood both in terms of the print materials marketed to people at this stage of life and in terms of the discourses in which it becomes an important consideration and significant trope. Both cases owe a great deal, of course, to changing demographics in Britain during the period, which saw considerable growth in the number of young people, and to economic growth that helped increase literacy rates and spurred a rapidly expanding text industry that quickly identified the opportunities afforded by the greater numbers of parents with disposable income.⁴ Added in this period to the existing juvenile corpus of hornbooks, battledores, chapbooks, devotional texts, fables, and conduct books was a remarkable range of reading material designed and marketed specifically for children: long-form fiction modelled on the novel for adult readers; periodicals; dramas for home theatricals; books of verse (particularly by the end of the century); and non-fiction works covering such subjects as the natural sciences, technological innovations, local and world geography and history, mathematics, and biography.

As children increasingly became subjects for whom adults wrote, they similarly became subjects about whom adults wrote with greater frequency. Pedagogical treatises and systems proliferated in the period, penned by some of the key luminaries of the age, most famously John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.⁵ Medical experts devoted greater attention to repairing and sustaining the health of young people, producing treatises for fellow practitioners, along with advice books for parents anxious to safeguard the immediate and future well-being of their offspring.⁶ The legal status of the child likewise became a matter of greater concern, and this interest manifested itself in novels and plays centring on issues of inheritance and apprenticeship, as Cheryl Nixon’s chapter in this volume discusses. As Susan Manly and Sebastian Mitchell demonstrate in their chapters, childhood also became a powerful trope that could be mobilized for different political agendas, while Ann Wierda Rowland, also a contributor to this volume, has shown elsewhere the extent to which theorizing about the child extended into theories of poetics and language.⁷

When we speak of changes in the realm of childhood, in the eighteenth century or in any other period, it is worth keeping in mind, as Adrienne Gavin notes, that these are never adopted uniformly or universally; it is a mistake to assume ‘each new – or seemingly new – construction of childhood neatly and irrevocably replaces its predecessor.’⁸ Likewise, such changes are rarely as unequivocally positive as is sometimes suggested by the accounts of children’s ‘progress’ common to later twentieth-century histories on the subject.⁹ Taking into account a variety of literary and print forms—novels, poetry, legal writing, periodicals, pamphlets, personal letters, graphic prints, along with the literature produced specifically for young readers—the authors of this volume explore the complex and sometimes paradoxical ways in which childhood was approached and represented in the period. To account for this complexity, this volume looks at eighteenth-century childhoods from a variety of angles: as a set of expectations, desires, concerns, limitations, and capacities adults sought to address in their writing for young people; as a trope or symbol that performed a range of cultural work in the writings adults produced for adult readers; as a lived, embodied experience children recorded and actively shaped. Then as now, the meanings of childhood were not always stable, and the boundaries—such as age—used to demarcate it were at times fluid, as Teresa Michals’s chapter here demonstrates. Childhood tended, as it still tends, to be invoked with purpose and its definition relies on the contexts in which it is being addressed. One of the fundamental contradictions of childhood within our culture illustrates this instability, and it is a contradiction that begins to take shape in the eighteenth century: that the child embodies, sometimes simultaneously, the promise of futurity as well as an ideal of, and longing for, a lost past. Childhood became a category equally suited to Enlightenment ideas of progress and improvement and to the sentimental and nostalgic ideas associated with what has come to be known as the ‘Romantic child.’

The study of historical children’s literature and childhood has not always co-habited easily with the modern field of ‘child studies.’ Peter Hunt famously and controversially insisted that current children’s literature scholarship should keep to works produced for children who are ‘recognizably’ like today’s children.¹⁰ At the same time, as Matthew Grenby recounts, bibliographers such as Brian Alderson, with deep investments in the historical particulars of children’s book publishing, have expressed frustration over recent trends in children’s literature criticism, ‘especially any criticism based on literary theory.’¹¹ This volume attempts to attend to the demands of rigorous historical analysis while remaining wholly aware of the theoretical concerns child studies as a discipline has raised over the problems of child-adult relations and of the constructedness of ‘childhood’ as a category. The essays here also acknowledge and build on recent methodological developments specific to the field of eighteenth-century children’s literature and culture, such as: the ideological readings of children’s texts pioneered by Isaac Kramnick and Alan Richardson; the feminist recuperations and reassessments Mitzi Myers helped initiate; and more recently reader-focused investigations of the sort pursued by Matthew Grenby.¹²

The thirteen chapters contained in this collection are arranged into three sections that correspond to some of the key aspects of child studies this introduction has tried to identify: definitions and experiences of childhood; children’s reading and pedagogy; and representations of childhood in adult discourse. Several offer fresh insights into texts and authors with considerable existing criticism: Jessica Evans’s look at pedagogy in Ann Radcliffe, or Richard De Ritter’s treatment of wonder in Arnaud Berquin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and others. They also bring to light now-obscure aspects of the period’s print culture, as in the case of Donelle Ruwe’s investigation into debates around the use of the ‘chiroplast’ in musical training. Some, such as Anja Müller’s recasting of child-adult power dynamics, bring new theoretical approaches to the field, while others, specifically Adriana Benzaquén’s study of children’s letter-writing, inform us about how young people in the period understood themselves within the system of family relations. Although the focus of this volume is very much on texts and discourses for and about childhood in the British context (more so than I had originally hoped would be the case), two of the essays here reach beyond England, to look at questions of race and childhood in the American context (Jennifer Thorn), and at British ex-patriot Eliza Fenwick’s efforts to forge a transatlantic pedagogy (Lissa Paul).

For a volume that concerns itself with English-language literary cultures, such a concentration on Britain is to be expected. There is, however, a growing body of scholarship on American childhoods and children’s literature in the eighteenth century.¹³ As well, childhoods in the Irish and Scottish, as well as the English provincial and labouring-class, contexts are certainly deserving of greater consideration; this proved regrettably not possible in this volume. Finally, while Jennifer Thorn’s essay makes an important contribution to scholarship on African-American childhood, much more remains to be investigated in this area, as well as in colonial and Indigenous childhoods.

Section I, ‘Status and Contexts of Childhood,’ gathers essays that situate childhood socially in the eighteenth century and explore its definitional contours. In ‘Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century,’ Teresa Michals offers a careful reading of the period’s most influential text about children, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which seeks to untangle ideas of age, dependence, social status, and the idea of ‘age-appropriate’ reading. As she reveals, the age-levelled reading we now assume to have a natural and obvious correspondence to children’s needs and capacities was also profoundly rooted in structures of social hierarchy. Anja Müller looks at one of the early eighteenth century’s most generative textual sites for discourses of childhood: widely read periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator. Her essay, ‘Circulating Childhood in Eighteenth-Century England,’ proposes a theoretical framework new to historical child studies, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, to re-evaluate the adult-child relationship. Instead of viewing childhood as merely the subject on which adult power is exercised, Müller proposes a more fluid dynamic in which its meanings are governed by networks of association between a variety of different actors.

In ‘Wards and Apprentices,’ Cheryl Nixon investigates the surprising complexity of the period’s family structures and the child’s legal status, especially within non-nuclear arrangements. Eighteenth-century England recognized a broad range of biological, marriage, and work alignments in its family structures, and the period’s literary texts were often preoccupied with wards and apprentices and how these dependent household members tested the limitations of the legally defined child. Adriana Benzaquén provides an intimate look into the family dynamics revealed in personal letters (John Locke’s friend and the dedicatee of Some Thoughts Concerning Education) Edward Clarke, his wife, and children wrote one another over many years. ‘Pray lett none see this impertinent Epistle’ offers unique insight into how children understood themselves within the network of family relations and how they moved between formal and familiar registers depending on the content and addressees of their correspondences.

The essays in Section II, ‘Reading, Pedagogy, and the Child’s Mind,’ focus primarily on writers for and educators of young people, what they saw as the stakes involved in literary production for child readers, and how they understood children as learners. Ann Wierda Rowland, in ‘Learned Pigs and Literate Children,’ considers the phenomenon of the famous ‘learned pig’ who exhibited mathematical and spelling prowess in the 1780s and became emblematic in the period’s elite literature of growing anxiety over popular print culture and the state of traditional social order. The pig, who makes an appearance in one of the period’s most renowned children’s books, Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, raises issues about literacy as a marker of difference not just between human and animal, but between adult and child as well. In ‘Eighteenth-Century Children’s Poetry,’ Louise Joy examines what poetry written for young readers in the period reveals about their mental capacities and how they acquire knowledge. The value of poetry as a pedagogical tool was widely debated in the period, as were concerns over the debasement of an elevated aesthetic form that producing a lower, child’s version entailed. Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, however, remained in print throughout the century and demonstrated both the utility of poetry to overall learning and the complex cognitive processes the young mind could perform.

The nature of the child’s mind, how it acquired information and knowledge, was a subject of considerable interest in the period. While Locke’s tabula rasa was decidedly the most influential psychological model across the eighteenth century, Susan Manly discusses a radical alternative in ‘Powers Expanding Slowly.’ Progressive writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Childhoods and Literary Cultures
• Section I. Status and Contexts of Childhood
• Section II. Reading, Pedagogy, and the Child’s Mind
• Section III. Shifting Representations and Meanings of Childhood
• Back Matter